My Day Job

A brief history of work:

I started programming in 1981 when I was 14 on a ZX81 and decided then that this is what I want to do. After almost 4 decades, I still love the world of I.T. and programming.

My professional work started on a Burroughs A15 and B5900 then soon after moved to IBM mainframes running MVS (I worked on an IBM 4360 while studying). I used a few languages within the mainframe environment such as COBOL, Pascal, FORTRAN, UFO, Easytrieve Plus, REXX and MANTIS. I also got my first experience of relational DB’s on an IBM mainframe with DB2.

Relational DBs just seemed to click with me, and I loved the structure and the query language SQL. This set me off on another track after a brief couple of years working with a 5GL from Texas instruments called IEF.

Since then, databases have been the backbone of my day job and up until now (2020) it has been Oracle DB. I loved the robustness of the DB and the procedural SQL language, PL/SQL, which was probably due to it having a similarity to Pascal. Pascal was one of my first languages after BASIC and one I also used on the PC to code Windows 3 and 95 programs using Delphi.

Moving on a little…….I have been designing transactional and data warehouse DBs since the 90’s and really loved the process of manipulating and organising data. I expanded from just designing the DB to the full life cycle of the DW project from analysis, ETL and reporting. I have worked on designs for retail, finance, shipping, and the Oil industry to name a few. All of these environments proved to be fascinating in their own way and reveal stories and insights into the world through their data.

I took a little time out to pursue another interest in forensic computing and did a MSc Computer Forensics at Westminster University which was great fun and has proved to be invaluable in my work. Security issues are a primary concern with any system and must be designed into any system and not an afterthought which it was in many cases.

I am still working with databases but within the AWS cloud environment mostly. Times have changed also regarding Oracle and my current job is migrating Oracle DBs to PostgeSQL on AWS. The cost differential is staggering and any company still using Oracle on premises should really consider migrating to PostgreSQL on AWS or their cloud platform of choice.

I also try to fit in as much time as I can for restoring and building 8-bit computers from the 80s. My current favourite is the Gigatron TTL computer.